Estimating heterogeneous effects of continuous exposures using Bayesian tree ensembles: revisiting the impact of abortion rates on crime

Abstract

In estimating the causal effect of a continuous exposure or treatment, it is important to control for all confounding factors. However, most existing methods require parametric specification for how control variables influence the outcome or generalized propensity score, and inference on treatment effects is usually sensitive to this choice. Additionally, it is often the goal to estimate how the treatment effect varies across observed units. To address this gap, we propose a semiparametric model using Bayesian tree ensembles for estimating the causal effect of a continuous treatment of exposure which (i) does not require a priori parametric specification of the influence of control variables, and (ii) allows for identification of effect modification by pre-specified moderators. The main parametric assumption we make is that the effect of the exposure on the outcome is linear, with the steepness of this relationship determined by a nonparametric function of the moderators, and we provide heuristics to diagnose the validity of this assumption. We apply our methods to revisit a 2001 study of how abortion rates affect incidence of crime.